Claustrophobia boardgame - priest fights demons in hell

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Adversarial two-player game, six different scenarios, random dungeons, asymmetric forces and a damage system which is a bit like Fallout 3's VATS in reverse. (Well, a tiny bit like it.) I think it's a solid game and I like playing it, but I do wonder if there'll be too much randomness for some people. ALso, it looks like it matters where you place your pieces on a tile, but it doesn't - positioning and facing don't count in the game.

Yeah, that it's only two players is a sticking point and I mentioned it in an earlier attempt at a review. Maybe in their collections boardgamers need 'just in case' games, where they can take one down if someone pops by.

I heard a lot of offhand comparisons to the new Ravenloft board game at GenCon. Can you compare them?

The similarities are mostly in how the map is explored and built: in both you place tiles as you go and the scenario often has you seeding the tile stack in a certain way. Beyond that the two really don't have that much in common. Ravenloft is purely cooperative, all players against the game. Claustrophobia is a standard one-on-one adversarial affair.

I've managed to get in a few plays of Claustrophobia and it's quite a bit of fun. Also a fantastic deal for the price as the components are gorgeous and there's quite a bit of replay value. I like how the humans and demons play very differently. The action assignment system for the humans is pretty cool, you roll d6 for all your characters and assign the dice to determine what each character's stats are for the round. When a character takes wounds you block off one of their six sets of stats and if you can't assign them a die they are inactive for the round. It's a pretty cool system and really makes you invested in your rolls and gives you decisions to make on assigning damage. My only complaint is that it can get a little fiddly with stats changing each round but it's pretty minor.

The demon player rolls dice to determine which actions they will take during their turn, often giving them special abilities, spawning new monsters, etc. It's a pretty cool system and gives the demon player some nice decisions to make as well.

Claustrophobia more closely resembles Space Hulk with the humans having only a few characters and the demons sending waves of bad guys at them. I've managed to play both a handful of times and I think I actually prefer Claustrophobia a bit. The theme is more appealing to me and I like the clever use of dice to determine what each player will be doing that turn. It really is designed for two players, though. I'd love to see them take this core system and maybe develop some sort of multiplayer game... that could be pretty cool.

Claustrophobia more closely resembles Space Hulk with the humans having only a few characters and the demons sending waves of bad guys at them.

I got that impression from your descriptions. Is it as much a survival challenge as Space Hulk?

My feeling is that Claustrophobia is a little more forgiving than Space Hulk, especially for the humans compared to the space marines. In Space Hulk one mistake by the marines can mean certain doom but in Claustrophobia the human have multiple hitpoints so you can more easily recover from tactical errors. Of course its the tension of planning versus the time limit in Space Hulk that really makes the game; with unlimited time the humans could always make the best moves and it'd all come down to die rolls.

I think Claustrophobia has much more of a dungeon crawler feel than the survival feeling of Space Hulk.